Murray Hunter & Geoffrey Williams
ASK any corporate employer in Malaysia what they want from graduates, and they will give you a list of skills lacking in the local cohort of graduates.
In fact, they have been doing this for decades; graduates have never been good enough for seasoned managers. Perhaps that is why entry-level salaries for graduates are only around RM2,000 per month, barely above the minimum wage.
Employers will talk about self-confidence, the ability to communicate concepts and ideas and basic creative and problem-solving as basic skills that are lacking.
For Gen-Z, they now include an absence of loyalty to the company, a lack of soft skills, professional etiquette and in-person experience due to virtual relationships built on phone Apps.
This problem is not new to local management educators. Existing weaknesses within management qualifications today have been covered in a previous article - https://www.thevibes.com/articles/education/122637/why-malaysian-management-education-lags-behind
This rigidness has led to graduates who present lots of issues when they are placed in front of potential employers who want prospective employees to show what they have during interviews.
Many local universities added communication workshops in their courses, some adding short courses on creativity and problem-solving.
Then, around seven years ago, some universities and colleges outsourced this problem to the UK-based Chartered Management Institute (CMI), awarding a ‘dual certificate’ at the end of the courses.
The intention was to develop management and leadership skills for individuals, showing them how to work in teams through coaching and mentoring.
There was meant to be a large focus on building communication and stakeholder relations skills and improving approaches to planning so that students could be more innovative.
This was all intended to have a practical focus
In fact, very few of these programmes were delivered by the CMI with their local partners, and what little was provided was often online, focused on low-cost ‘management style’ sharing sessions on diversity, equity and inclusion, empathy for other cultures, promoting women in leadership or focusing on sustainability or environmental, social and governance (ESG).
This is agenda-driven advocacy, not practical management and leadership training.
As a result, the burden of practical management education was left to existing lecturers, who usually come from an academic background. Most have never had a job outside of a university and are poorly equipped to prepare students for the challenges of the new labour market, as employees let alone as managers.
Almost all academics, even in business schools, have never set up and run their own businesses, and the outcomes for graduates show this huge gap.
Around 90% of Malaysian graduates look for jobs in an oversupplied labour market, with almost two million winding up under-employed in non-graduate jobs. Almost half of graduates are unemployed, under-employed or outside the labour market.
Only 10% of graduates set up their own businesses or micro-enterprises, growing to local, regional or global business powerhouses.
To tackle this, there were new train-the-trainer sessions for the academics, delivered by external ‘expert consultants’ with ‘industry experience’ but no academic credentials.
In the end, very little, if anything, from the original management curricula was changed as academics returned to the classroom and opened their old textbooks and slides again.
As a result, employers still have the same perceptions of the local cohort of graduates.
Moving to the future in management education
The first thing that must be done is to understand the difference between learning management theories and practices on the one hand and, on the other, organising, communicating and solving problems creatively and pragmatically in practice.
Learning how to work in groups requires a lot of practice and mentoring. In essence, the theory of management and practising as a manager are two separate fields of study.
Once this is understood, universities and colleges can then tackle the problem by creating a stream of practical education within their management courses.
This should not be just an add-on group assignment and presentation, but a whole semester project in tackling a business problem or even starting a simple business enterprise from scratch.
This will involve developing specific workstreams on how to organise and deal with the forces that promote and inhibit efficient organisation, how to communicate and present ideas effectively and how to use creativity and problem-solving in practice.
Students must learn how to use and integrate all these skills at the same time within a workplace.
All this cannot be undertaken within classroom formats; special facilities must be prepared.
In fact, in large multinationals, special learning spaces are available to train staff. For example, retail giants have mock stores where managers learn how to run customer and operations systems effectively.
Global hotel chains have student-run facilities with restaurants, guest rooms and front-desk operations on-campus.
In the 1980s, Swinburne University of Technology developed a Management Behavioural Laboratory (MBL) that contained several meeting rooms and office sets, where students would run preset exercises without teacher interference for a day.
The area is decked out with cameras and microphones, and their activities are recorded.
The groups would then be given feedback at the end of the day on positive and negative behaviours and results.
These are only a few examples of what can be done, but moving into this practical management education realm will very quickly lead to very positive results for local student cohorts.
For the universities and colleges, this requires both an intellectual and financial investment.
It also requires a significant change in mindset and leadership, not just in Business Schools but across all subjects and student cohorts.
However, such an approach would very quickly enhance the reputations of universities and colleges that went in that direction. – May 13, 2026
